Before we moved into our new house, I told myself that I would not pull up any plants the first year we lived here. I would live with them, whether they looked ugly to me or not, because sometimes a plant that looks bad in late August may have been beautiful in April. I am giving them a chance to prove their worth, so to speak.
So today I simply cut back rather than uprooted ugly unkempt plants. I did pull some up by their roots, but they were easily identified as small trees. And pokeberry plants, I would know them anywhere. The rest got a good shearing.
The reason I am trying to not pull up all of the plants is because at the first house that we bought, I decided to bring order to the chaos that was all around our mailbox by "weeding". Instead, I took out a good hunk of creeping phlox (now a personal favorite) and some daylilies and clumps of yarrow. I didn't know they were perennials; I just thought they were ugly.
What if we did that to our friends? There was a man in our church when we first got married who struck me as a rigid, judgmental, ultra-conservative homeschooling dad with whom I would have little in common. I would have pulled him right out of my circle of acquaintances, if I could have, but we both went to the same church, so it was hard to avoid him. Well, when we decided to finish our basement ourselves, my husband started calling on him for advice, because he was in the construction business. And he ended up coming over to check things out. He ended up coming A LOT because we had no idea what we were doing. And the more I got to know him, the more I realized how completely I had misjudged him. He is a great guy with a big servant's heart, and when we think of the folks we miss seeing now that we moved here, he is right there, one of our dearest friends.
Give your plants a little while before you decide they are weeds. You may regret getting rid of them.
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